


Enough to Fill the Albert Hall

by Deadybones



Category: Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei
Genre: Brotherly Bonding, Canon - Anime, Dark Comedy, Family, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Magical Realism, Suspense, Throwback, gen - Freeform, philosophical meditation on the purpose of art, sneaky beatles references
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 05:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16056608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deadybones/pseuds/Deadybones
Summary: All art is, ultimately, a kind of sacrifice. Don't let anybody tell you different! After losing his wife under mysterious circumstances, Kei drags Nozomu along for wild goose chase through the outskirts of Kyoto, full of mystery, memory, and plenty of raising Cain.





	1. Disc 1, “A” SIDE – A lucky man who made the grade

**Author's Note:**

> Waaaaay back in the late aughts, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei was my main fandom, and I wrote a lot of stuff for it that I'm still kinda proud of. I planned on this being my big magnum opus to say goodbye to the series, but never got around to posting it, and just when I was ready to, the manga ended... And boy, did it ever end. So I worried what I'd written was gonna be too far off canon to be enjoyable. But you know what? The hell with it! I just found this on an old hard drive and despite a decade of hindsight, I still think the writing's still pretty okay. So I decided to finally post it (mostly) unedited in serial form and make it everyone's problem. Enjoy!

Nozomu Itoshiki was asleep in front of a muted television in the school's boarding annex when the phone rang late one rainy Thursday night in early Winter. The shrill tremolo of the old rotary model rattled the hallway, shaking him out of a shallow, dreamless stupor. He pulled a blanket over his shoulders before shuffling into the empty corridor. By the time he got there, the phone had already rung out into silence, and he was just about to turn back, when again, it sounded. He took hold of the icy Bakelite receiver.

"It's me,” replied Kei. “How soon can you get to Kyoto?”

“Kei _-niisan_...?"

“Hope it's not too much to ask, but I have to speak with you. As soon as possible.”

“Fortunately, Alexander Graham Bell did invent something for such circumstances. What on earth is the matter?”

Kei groaned, saying it was extremely complicated and could only be explained over a few strong drinks.

“Besides. I tried Mikoto already; he's busy all week. Thyroid conference in Bangkok or something, so don't you go bothering him, neither. Called everyone else, too - even tried getting a hold of Enishi, the old bastard. No luck, nobody. You are my absolute last resort, Nozomu.”

“How very nice to know you see me that way,” Nozomu replied flatly, mindlessly coiling the phone cord around his index finger.

Truth be told, he was quite relieved to hear all this - up until then, he wasn't completely sure this wasn't just another ore-ore phone scam. He tended to be a little paranoid about them. (In the late 1990's, he'd accidentally signed over his immortal soul to a man from Kushiro.) 

“No, no, no, you don't _un-der-sta-a-and,_ Nozomu. This is serious.” Kei paused for effect and then exhaled loudly, maybe puffing out a lungful of smoky breath at the other end of the line. “Seriously serious."

Nozomu sat down, nestling up sleepily against the wall, and said he was all ears. He imagined that a certain degree of stress would be natural for Kei, and had to argue with himself whether it would be okay to resent him for it. On one hand, this was Kei – the craziest damn crazy who ever crazied it up in Crazytown. On the other, this was Kei – his brother.

Kei had been nominated for a retrospective exhibition in the Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art the previous year, and the date of the opening was now only a couple of weeks away. Nozomu also knew from a contact in the Tokyo arts-et- belles-lettres underworld (rather than from his brother directly,) that Kei had also been commissioned for a very considerable sum to put together a new work specifically for the event. The exact amount was unknown to all but Kei and his patroness. Nozomu had met that woman once a few years before over champagne at a fundraiser for a now-defunct artist collective.

Ms. Kanehori was an overseas-born art dealer in her early forties, and pragmatic about her business; very shrewd. When Nozomu asked her opinion for what makes a great artist these days, she'd winked a squarish eye, and said simply, “the deader, the better!” And Nozomu had nearly laughed in spite of himself.

With the advance on said commission, however, Kei's lifestyle had gradually altered to suit his new station. The prices his artworks fetched went on the rise. His name cropped up on shortlists for all the Biennales. Then the school's gym equipment stopped mysterious disappearing, and it turned out he'd emigrated from his squat-atelier in the sports prep shed, and into the priory of a deconsecrated temple near N--- University. All without bothering to tell anyone.

Since then, the brothers hadn't seen much of each other. For instance, when Nozomu's birthday rolled around in early November, Kei didn't even send a text message. The only real contact he'd made in the past few months was an undated post-card from the rebuilt Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, scrawled with the following message:

_Dear N!! at T. of the G.P.!!_

_got a light??_ haahaahaa _!! say hi to M + 2-H for me!!_

_yrs. w. love + squalor!! – K!!!!!_

_P.S. To my favourite little brother-in-law - XOXOX from us both!_

In the space of a single season at most, he'd left nothing in Nozomu's life but a Kei-shaped void.

Still, it's not that he was bitter about it. True, they were brothers. The same cursed blood flowed in their veins. But Nozomu was hard pressed to remember the last time when he and Kei had ever had a Deep And Meaningful Conversation. Not that it mattered, Nozomu thought: it's perfectly normal for adult children-- that is, for adult _siblings_ to drift apart.

This was why his brother's sudden, troubled call surprised Nozomu much more than it might have otherwise.

“It's...it's a drag, man," said Kei at the tail end of a long pause. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to cut my ear off. But I do need to see you, regardless. I just don't know too many people in Kansai – at least, nobody who really _gets_ me. You know?"

"I can't honestly say that I do."

“But you _do,_ though!” Kei giggled madly for a moment. “Yes, you do, good Nozomu, beloved Nozomu, youngest brother of all my brothers. And here's why. _The flow_ giveth, and _the flow_ taketh away. Do you get my drift?”

Nozomu echoed the two English words to himself in a hush. The flow? Nausea sluiced through him. He put his hand to the ground. Was it still there? Yep, still there. Slight relief.

“That's what it comes down to, I suppose,” Kei muttered as if talking to himself. “Damned if I understand it, though. Back in the old days, they'd definitely just call this a kamikakushi. Spirited away - you know, like Chihiro in the movies! Simple! But what good does that do me? This is Kyoto! And the year is Showa 8X! And aprés toi, le derive..."

"I don't even know what that means."

"It's French for I need to ask a favor of you.”

“Niisan...” Nozomu rubbed at the inside-corners of his closed eyes. “I'm sorry, but you've lost me. I'm going back to bed, all right? We can talk when you're a bit less... Well, like this.”

“Oh, please please please, Nozomu, just come here! No more questions, I'm begging you! I'm just a fish out of water, see? And a man without a woman is like a fish run over by a bicycle, and she's... ”

“You're drunk, aren't you?”

“Not nearly enough!” Kei howled with sarcastic laughter. Then silence crept over him, and did not waver. And this was a strange, weighty silence. It muted out real sound, so that everything else – the crackle of the phone-line, the drone of the heaters and humidifiers, the gauzy rain drumming the windows - died out. It made the many miles between them concrete. At last, Kei answered with a damp, half-choking noise, right in-between a chuckle and a whimper.

"She's gone."

"What?"

“She's gone. My wife's gone.”

***

Soon as the sun rose, the first thing Nozomu did was make an online booking for the first available bullet train to Kyoto. With a phoney alibi about an ex- girlfriend's funeral in Kuraizawa, he politely asked his colleague Ms. Chie Arai to mind 2-H and feed the class hikikomori for a few days. He foisted his nephew into the care of Jun Kudou, a level-headed male student whom Nozomu considered the #1 least likely of all his many acquaintances to lose, injure or traumatize the child. Finally, he replaced one of the Enya CDs in his travel kit with a toothbrush and a few changes of underpants. By lunchtime Friday, he was well on his way.

But Nozomu was not his brother's keeper. It wasn't on account of loving-kindness or even familial obligation that he had agreed to make the trip down to Kyoto, and work out what (if anything) had gone wrong between Kei and his 100% ideal wife. It was just curiosity, he told himself, repeatedly. Maybe even a little tender schadenfreude. They were as different as brothers could get, and anyway, the sell-out probably had it coming. What's next, honestly, moving to New York?

The Kanto plains blurred past the shinkansen like a Windows '95 screensaver. Nozomu read a literary magazine, full of short stories and long titles and signifying nothing. When he grew bored of it, he tried to fall asleep, but it did him no good. He'd been lost in thought and memory for hours now.

Since moving out of the family estate, for a few years, the remaining brothers Itoshiki had acted like former captives of the same P.O.W. camp – tied together by shared experiences, but not going out of their way to meet regularly due to the traumas it'd dredge up. This was why it took Nozomu and Mikoto a while first to notice, and then to point out to each other, that Kei's behaviour was getting stranger and stranger by the month.

The turning point had been the New Year's Eve of Showa 7X, when Nozomu was in the last year of his college degree. Kei failed to show up for a major family event on the estate. Instead, he'd called Mikoto at 4 AM. He needed bail.

“As I'm sure you realize,” Kei said, or rather proclaimed, “I'm a political prisoner.”

Kei had apparently teamed up with some artist friends to cover the west walls of the Imperial Diet building in a beautiful abstract mural, “mainly on the themes of death and rebirth, and so, ultimately, about hope.”

The other six of them had scarpered as soon as the police vans rolled up, but Kei was steadfast. Brush in hand, doused with paint, his defiant stance cast a dozen shadows under the blue police strobe lights.

"You do all this yourself, eh?" they asked him.

Kei gave a deep bow, and smiled gently. "Thou sayest."

So - there he was, January 1st, held overnight on five counts of vandalism, plus one of assault. (After declaring in the first interview that “all is forgivable in the name of art,” he allegedly put his own attorney in a headlock and refused to let go until he admitted how good the mural was. _Allegedly_.)

“But on the bright side, I didn't sell out anyone, and they didn't find the stash,” he added in a whisper, but was afterwards soon charged with substance possession, anyhow.

That morning, while waiting for one of the house lackeys to bring around the good Aston-Martir, Mikoto proposed some kind of _intervention_ in the New Year. He'd made a point of using the English word. Mikoto was fixing his necktie in the anteroom mirror.

“I'm at the end of my rope with him, Nozomu. This isn't the first time he's called me like this, either. It's not that I haven't tried, but me trying to get through to him? It's pointless. He's a complete right-brainer. I'll never understand right-brainers." "

"I'm very much a right-brainer," Nozomu contested, cracking sleep out of his stiff shoulders.

"Then what do you think we should do, Nozomu? You can just tell he'll be the first of us to die if we keep on doing nothing.”

Nozomu thought about it a little while. “

Observation isn't the same as doing nothing," he decided out loud. "At least, that's my opinion.”

"Well, you could say that, but -- yes. Or, no... Oh, I don't know," Mikoto trailed off, then put his arms to his side and turned around briskly.

"Does this tie look alright to you?"

Nozomu had thought the puce a bit much and said so.

After this came his move to the Tokyo, and then his first marriage. Then, his divorce, and then, his remarriage. Then, his success in the slipstream, and then, in the mainstream. He certainly seemed to be managing okay, art-wise. As Kei careened headlong through life with kamikaze abandon, "observation" remained the official family protocol.

The idea of revamping it did not occur to Nozomu, even as the bullet train pulled into the Kyoto-Kintetsu terminal around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Above the lattice of iron rafters, the Kansai sky was a glassy blue. Looking up, he quickly felt that he'd come a long way. Nozomu took a street-car to the high-end hotel in Nishikujo-Inmachi where Kei's benefactress had been sponsoring his expenses in full. To be precise about it, Kei wasn't in the hotel proper, but the serviced apartments which had been built as a fancy annexe. Even so, it was the hotel that caught Nozomu's attention – a misshapen mirror-glass edifice called “The Plus Alpha Towers.”

A repellent brass sculpture of an angel riding a narwhal loomed above its threshold. Dolphin Conglomerate Corporate Accommodation, read the welcome sign. It made Nozomu uneasy. He had, as of late, developed a vague aversion to dolphins. He took the elevator to the 3b-th floor of Kei's building. The door to his brother's studio was unlocked, open a crack, had a defaced Malevich poster on the outside, and a stack of used plates piled in front. Nozomu nudged them aside with his foot, and for the sake of being polite, knocked.

“Well?" he said apprehensively. "Here I am.”

No reply.

Nozomu cautiously opened the door, and found Kei face-down on the floor in a pool of what he hoped was red paint.

“Oh dear God, Kei!! If only you'd have waited a few hours...!” Nozomu collapsed to the floor at Kei's side - stopped himself just short of clutching his brother's frigid hand.

“It would have made a great double-suicide, you madman! And I'll bet you didn't even remember the 'down the road, not across the street' rule...!” 

Just then, quicker than he could even scream, another powerful arm swung up over Nozomu's shoulder, and pinned him to the ground.

“Best of all possible mornings to you,” yawned Kei, not bothering to open his eyes. He was obviously a little bit hungover, but that not withstanding, quite cheerful. He certainly didn't sound like a man who'd just lost his wife, which could've well been a good sign. Nozomu sighed with reluctant relief.

“Good afternoon,” he corrected. “Assault me like that even once more and I'm cutting off relations with you altogether, understood?”

“Missed you, too, my brother.”

The floor was covered from wall-to-wall in a blue plastic tarpaulin, and from sleeping with his face pressed against it, a tight grid of crosses was embossed into the skin of Kei's cheek. If not for that, the chaos in the apartment would have been total. Paint was splattered over every inch of wall, the air rank with dead flaxseed oil and turpentine. A odd chill was filling the whole place, too. The empty bar-fridge had been left open overnight. Nozomu pointed this out, and shivered petulantly.

“Sorry about all the mess,” said Kei sleepily. He licked his thumb and tried smudging a patch of dried epoxy resin off the tip of his nose. “Up late working on the commission. Finally finished it off a couple hours ago. Apart from yours truly, you are the owner of the very first pair of human eyes to see it.”

What a strange way of phrasing things his brother had. Squirming free a little and sitting up, Nozomu lifted his gaze to the opposite wall. There, in all its terror and magnificence, was the painting.

It undulated across the stretched linen of the canvas in great organs of form and color, all kinds of other things glued on top in heavy collage. It was not static, but rather seemed to leak out over the edges of its own composition, ready at any moment to creep onto the walls and cover them too, in a messy rainbow web.From one angle, it looked like a bird, from another, an exploding head, close up, the human sex organs, from a distance, mandalas and sunflowers growing out of a corpse. A clever art critic like Ms. Kanehori could look at it and write one hell of an acquisitions proposal. It would be about how The Artist had arranged the formal elements of line and colour in such a way as to deconstruct not only the division between the pictorial and the abstract, but also the ideal and the real – in other words, questioning the very post-modernist project, and counterpointing the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.

But, as they say, writing about a painting is like dancing about architecture, and would have little to do with what Kei painted, or what Nozomu saw.

“Well! You must be very proud,” Nozomu said sincerely. He tilted his head and wondered what it was supposed to be. “It's good.”

“No, no, it's not good.” Kei hauled himself up on one elbow while he groped around on the ground for his glasses. He set them in place, looking deeply into Nozomu's eyes, as if checking his reflection in them. “It's my life entire.”

 


	2. Disc 1, "B" Side - Looking up, I noticed I was late

In the time it took Kei to clean himself up and pile his art supplies away in a corner, Nozomu caught up on a few hours' sleep. Lying on the impossibly comfortable hotel bed, he couldn't help but dream.

He dreamt that he was on an empty beach, walking towards the water with his pockets full of heavy black stones. He caressed the smooth dark surface of one of them. Well, no, they weren't stones, he felt, but strange, heavy, organic black things, lurking secret as kidneys and shifting shape a little. Black things that weren't made of anything... In fact, the effect was more like having pocketfuls of solid holes, and more than he wanted to count.

Then, it being a dream, he realised the holes had gotten too warm and turned into penguins for some reason, and so obviously that meant he had to turn back and start over. So he went back to his house, which was also on the beach for some reason. His good friend Lee Nakanao was there for some reason, and, for some reason, asked if he could borrow 350 yen. But that's simply out of the question, Lee, said Nozomu in the dream, because you never returned that DVD I lent you. Lee replied he'd get around to it, but then for some reason, suddenly, they both were sitting a college entrance exam. Nozomu hadn't studied at all, and to make matters worse, he was naked. And then Lee was, for some reason, the Loch Ness Monster.

Nozomu's dreams were never very profound, but he still didn't like how Kei shook him awake.

“C'mon, get up. Bar's open,” said Kei, glaring over the thick top-frame of his glasses. Something in his mood was so much darker now.

Together, the brothers made their way downstairs and into the main hotel next door. He was like an accidental Moses parting the Red Sea of human traffic in the lobby. They all seemed to recognise and respect him. Kei ignored them and walked quickly, on with a certain arrogance indistinguishable at a distance from elegance, but Nozomu was only a few paces behind.

They staked a window seat in the smoking section of the hotel cocktail bar. From the back of the room, a piano trio was playing exactly the sort of music you'd expect to find in a hotel cocktail bar. The bland rhythm grated on Kei's nerves.

“Young lady!” he barked at a passing waitress and demanded an oolong highball for his tab. “What'll you be having, Nozomu?”

Nozomu scanned the menu in the dim light, resting an elbow on the table. “You wouldn't happen to know what the one with vodka and Irish Cream is called, would you?”

“No idea. Sounds repulsive. Get a proper drink.”

“No, I'm telling you, it's really quite good. I shared one with Chie-sensei at the end-of-year staff party.”

“Who?”

“Chie Arai. The guidance counselor. You know her.”

“No, I don't.”

“But you must've met her fifty times back at the school! For pity's sake, if you've met her once, you've met her fifty--”

“I think it's called a Screaming Orgasm, sir,” the waitress interjected helpfully.

“... Oolong tea highball for me too, please," said Nozomu.

After that, only the empty conversations of strangers and the band's unenthused rendition of Chet Baker's "My Ideal" passed for human interaction. As though completely absorbed in the activity, Kei took a thin kiseru pipe and a bag of tobacco from a pouch at his hip. He rolled about a thimble's worth of it between his thumb and forefinger and stuffed it into the gold-plated pipe bowl. He struck a match, took a mechanical drag, and began to look out the window with a melancholy expression.

“My patron has been good to me lately,” Kei said absently. "Very good."

He looked like he might have been about to add to that, but didn't. He just sat there, wordlessly smoking, drinking, resenting the mediocre jazz.

Given that his brother was the kind of person who usually laughed too easily and got too angry, his silence left Nozomu feeling strangely sad as well. He wanted to say something. Or to put it more accurately, he wanted something to say.

The drinks arrived. Kei raised his glass to say 'cheers', but Nozomu quickly downed his tea in a single burning gulp, just trying to get the conversation rolling.

“So, when exactly did you notice she'd left, niisan?”

Kei smiled slightly and took hold of Nozomu's hands, stroked them gently like they were so precious. “I'll never be able to repay you for your coming here, my brother.”

\---

“But she didn't leave, you must understand that,” said Kei severely. “She vanished. And it was about two weeks ago that it happened.

“I woke up at home – that is to say, I woke up in the hotel – and I could tell right away I was all by myself. There was no-one in bed, no heavily little footfalls in the ensuite or anything. I called out for her, and no-one answered. I thought at first she'd just gone to the store or to take a bath or something, so I waited in bed for her. All day. And she did not come back.

“First, I thought it was grotesque. Like she was reproaching me, though as far as I could tell I hadn't done anything wrong. And for a split-second, I thought I understood - and I despised her. Some women are like that, Nozomu. They put up with you for ex-number of years, then it turns out there's someone else. And the next thing you know, you're putting your little red stamps on the divorce papers. This, I learned the hard way.

"But here's the thing," Kei said slowly, practically spelling out the words.

"Unlike Yuka, she didn't leave a note. I asked around. She wasn't at her parents' house. She hadn't told any of her friends, or even checked out of the condo. And deep down, I know that this woman is unlike any other. She wouldn't hurt me. She could never, even if she tried. She is my 100% ideal woman, by her very definition."

Nozomu filled and refilled his mouth with the salted baby soybeans on the plate beside him. He tried to keep a stern expression while he did so. He refused to be dragged into another man's delusions. He had enough of his own to deal with. And yet - mysteriously enough - here he found himself listening quietly, like any good little brother should.

_Am I a congenital pushover?_ Nozomu wondered in despair, unshelling another green pod. _Why don't I just tell him that he's lost track of reality? I should do that, I really should. Okay, I will. I'm going to stand up for myself to Kei for once. And I'm going say in a big voice 'I'm taking you back to the hospital.' That's what would be the best thing for him by this stage, wouldn't it? Drat, all out of edamame..._

So - on three. Going to do it. One, two, three.

“Why didn't you just go to the police, niisan?”

Damn it.

“Rest assured, dear brother,” said Kei, “I did just so. That very night, I went and told them to put out a missing persons' notice or something. Anything. But when I gave them a description they just looked at me like I was mad and said there was nothing they could do. So I went looking around in the city, in all the places I'd taken her and she'd said she liked a lot. I put a 10-line advertisement in the classified section of every major newspaper in the country, every day for a week.”

“And?”

“Nothing, no luck, no-one. I felt like there was some kind of stone trapped inside of myself, weighing me down so I couldn't move. A brilliantly black, formless kind of a stone, that wasn't made of anything-- Like a solid hole. Holes, plural. Thousands of them. But I wonder if you understand this?"

Kei ordered another drink for himself and, arranging his pipe for the second time, he continued.

“For several days after this, I ate nothing, didn't sleep, didn't even bother to change my clothes. All I did was work on that painting - the one I showed you. At the time I had it in my head that if I could just get that goddamn thing finished, I'd turn around, and there'd she be. And we'd make love. That's all I wanted, Nozomu. I needed to kiss her and touch her neck and to breathe her, because I love her more than my very life. To be inside that woman again can be my only salvation in this world.”

Nozomu brought his hands over his ears and looked away. “I don't want to know. Really. Please.”

"As you wish," said Kei.

The moon had already traced a long eastward path halfway across the sky. It was still early evening, but what with the winter sun already setting around half past four, it may as well have been midnight. Asterisms of light filled the black streets below. So very much smaller than Tokyo, Nozomu was thinking, looking out the window and running his finger around the lip of his empty teacup. As if you could put it all in a little box and bury it.

"But you know," Kei went on, "I'm not quite finished."

Nozomu didn't answer, but must've looked like he wanted to hear more.

"I must've still been my afore-mentioned filthy, ascetic state for some time, when Ms Kanehori came knocking on the door.

"'I happened to learn that you've recently lost your wife, Mr. Itoshiki,” she said to me, 'I'm terribly sorry.'

“To tell you the truth, the thought that she might've died hadn't even occurred to me, and -- Nozomu, I am ashamed, and will later deny I ever told you this – I began to cry, right in front of her.

“ 'Oh, rest assured, Mr. Itoshiki, I didn't mean in that sense! I didn't get that impression at all when I heard the news. It seems more like a spiriting away... Something of that nature? I came by, in any case, because I happen to know someone who should be able to help you.

“ 'He's a soothsayer. As far as I know he's not Buddhist, or Shinto, or Christian, or from any of those new religious movements. So around these parts, everyone who does believe in something but isn't anything in particular goes to see him for problems like this. You won't need to pay him, but a small gift certainly wouldn't go amiss. Here, I'll give you his contact card.'

“The card was so thin, it looked like someone'd just torn a page out of an old book. She gave me a couple hundred thousand in cash as well. Who knows why. I suppose I looked down on my luck.

“ 'The most important thing to me is your wellbeing, Mr. Itoshiki. Take good care of yourself. But please remember, you have the retrospective to be concerned about, too.

“ 'Come what may, I will need your artwork completed by then.'

“So I naturally went to the soothsayer the next day. It was in the morning, and cold, raining. He was in the old town, up in the hills, where everything's still made of wood and smells weird when it gets wet. He was an old man, but I can't guess how old. Come to think of it, he didn't really look like a Japanese, either. I gave an offering at the altar to the nothing-in-particular he believed in, bowed. And turned off my cell-phone, of course. You know. To be polite.

“I felt a strong spiritual presence, but I couldn't identify it. It'll sound odd, but when I was in that room, the walls and the floor felt sort of hazy. It's a certain aura, which certain people such as myself are sensitive to, but left-brainers wouldn't understand. How can I put it... It was like I could walk through the wall and it would spit me out somewhere new on the other side. But I decided to stay just where I was. Where else would I go, anyway?

“So. 'Tell me where she is, please,' I said. 'Is she dead?'

“He smiled at me and said, 'I promise you, your wife is alive and well at this moment in time. Or to put it more accurately, she is not in any particular moment in time... But she is nevertheless doing quite well, all things considered.'

“I didn't understand, and I said as much. He dodged the issue.

“ 'You are a healthy man, Kei Itoshiki,' he says, 'with a great deal of energy. You have worked hard and become successful at what it is you have chosen to do. Your family loves you dearly, and yours is a very beautiful wife, in your eyes. You are a great artist, and for you, I get the impression art is the most important thing, next to her. You, Mr. Kei, are a very lucky man."

“That's what he said to me. But I didn't feel like a lucky man. Without her, I felt like the lowest, most twisted, cancerous little insect in the world.

“The oracle then said, 'I understand you've recently come into a great deal of money, haven't you, Mr. Itoshiki?'

“ 'Yes, sir,” I said back.

“ 'It's clear that therein lie the problems. You are suffering from an overflow of good fortune. The flow around you has become unbalanced. So, it has made a decision for you, and taken away something of great value. The universe has unburdened you of your excess joy. From the perspective of the flow, it's a simple matter of homeostasis. The flow giveth, and the flow taketh away.'

“ 'In other words, the flow hath taken her away?' I asked. 'So what should I do to get her back here?'

And son of a bitch! he sounded angry when I said that.

“ 'One does not bargain with the cosmos, Mr. Itoshiki! It does not grant our wishes like some magic goose. It tells us, before grace, suffering. You can weep all you want, but the flow is cruel as a burning house. You can only take what you can carry. Its opinion, final.'

 

“I came out of that building feeling stone drunk. My head was spinning. I went back to apartment and looked at the painting. I worked on it for one godawful thirty-hour stretch. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat... I just couldn't stop myself! You're not an artist, so probably won't understand why. But the thing -- the one thing -- that stopped me was rather bloody prosaic. I got... some voicemail."

The way Kei said it reminded Nozomu of the old "let's say mundane things dramatically" game. He could swear for a second he even saw a bit of backlighting.

"A young girl's voice," Kei continued without skipping a beat. "She sounded a little familiar, but no-one I could place off the top of my head.

"She said, 'Hi Mr. Zekkei, remember me? I saw your ad in the paper... A spiriting away, right? Gosh, I hope you're doing okay!

“ 'But haven't you done your homework, Mr. Zekkei? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to get something back, you have to give something away. So you just have to think positive! Do your best, Mr. Zekkei! In the name of love! Bye-bye!' Click. ”

With that, Kei finished his drink, then bared his eye teeth like he'd just heard a fantastic joke, stretching the corners of his mouth as far as they'd go. “Hear that? That's what I needed to remember. I just needed to think positive!"

“So I did my homework! I got it into my head to check some temple and shrine archives, call in some friends, ask around on the internet, et cetera. And I'm positive what we really need here is a kind of metaphysical hostage exchange. Imagine, pray, I wrote up a big list of all the things I need in life. My wife takes out the top spot, and I need to get rid of the first runner up. That, Nozomu, is why I asked you here.”

“... Pardon?” Nozomu chirped.

“Uh, that is to say," Kei hastily amended, folding his hands together and then unfolding them in quick succession, with a confident look on his face. "I'm referring, of course, to the painting what I showed you not half an hour ago. The better part of a year of my life on canvas ought do the trick. All you'll need to help me get out of town, carry a few things... Stuff like that. From time to time, one does need a brother's help. So - what say you, brother Nozomu?”

It was a bit much to take in at once. In fact, Nozomu had been staring with his mouth ajar in a peculiar half-smile for some time after Kei stopped talking. What

can you even say to something like that? Nozomu wondered. Come on, director! Line, please!

“The end,” Kei added emphatically. He wanted a response.

“Well, yes. No. I don't know..." Nozomu muttered, fidgeting with an empty bean pod.

"What does that even mean?"

"Well, that is to say, I suppose I'll do what I can for you in powers, but I doubt that could be very much, niisan."

With one quick motion of his strong arms, Kei upturned the table. It clattered to the ground with a godawful smash. He clambered up on top of it.

“BULLSHIT!” Kei shouted magnificently, pointing right in his brother's face  “There's a whole laundry list of things you can do for me, Nozomu!”

“Excuse me, sir, but you're making a scene,” said the waitress from before. Kei ignored her, grabbed Nozomu by the lapels of his off-white checkered kimono and pulled him up so close, he could feel Kei's scraggly facial hair brush against him.

“And the first thing we need is one huge-ass van!”

The glowing smile on Kei's face that moment was strong enough to warm even Nozomu's heart a little. Sadly, even this wasn't enough to stop them getting kicked out of the bar.

**Author's Note:**

> (This was written in loose continuity with another fic "A Left Hook Like God's", which someone linked here under an old pseudo.)


End file.
